Effects of electron multiplication on the CCD SNR in remote sensing application

A mathematical model describing the effect of electron multiplication (EM) gain on the detector signal to noise ratio (SNR) is presented, and then two types of experiment have been made to test their relationship. The experimental results of the radiometric calibration and imaging in practice both show that the initial EM gain amplification makes the most significant improvement on the EM charge coupled device (CCD) SNR, while as the gain factor continues to increase, the EMCCD SNR improvement will become negligible.